News of the Week
The New Zealand Earthquake - XTEW ZEALAND mourns and all the Empire mourns with her. Although New Zealand, and particularly the North Island, is characteristically: volcanic and con- tinually subject to earthquakes, there has been no such Catastrophe in her history as that which occurred on Tuesday. The earthquake of 1929 was much less serious. It had been. popularly supposed that the moderately active volcanos of the North Island and the hot lake district were a safety valve, and if one had named the most likely district for a serious earthquake one would hardly have thought of Hawkes Bay. The earthquake came just before eleven o'clock in the morning and shook of most of the buildings in the business quarter of Napier on the coast and in that of Hastings, which is a few miles inland. It is said that the well- known Bluff which overlooks the sea at Napiei "changed its shape. Large fissures opened in the streets and roads. The bed of the harbour rose about eighteen feet, H.M. sloop ' Veronica ' apparently grounded when the water fell away and was then washed into deep water by the returning seismic wave. Napier has a population of about sixteen thousand and--Hastings of- about fourteen thousand.
